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Window on the World

by kristin harper   ::   posted on Oct. 17, 2007 - 12:36pm

Brave New Worlds, up through February 17 at the Walker Art Center, considers "the present state of political consciousness, expressed through the questions of how to live, experience, and dream." The seventy works by twenty-four artists from seventeen countries were organized by Walker curators Doryun Chong and Yasmil Raymond; 10,000 arts spoke to Chong about the exhibition:

How did the idea for this show come about?

Almost all of us in the field are feeling a certain kind of urgency. Exhibitions dealing with the topic of wars, the topic of America, are turning up in Europe. We wanted to blow it up into something more encompassing ... this work seems different in how it strives to be responsible to the world.

With such a broad topic, relatively speaking, how did you narrow the field to just two dozen artists?

We didn't "discover" these artists. We're looking at a range of practices to see what's out there. We went to places like Poland or Romania, where there isn't really an arts infrastructure, but many of the artists were very savvy anyway. The most interesting ideas are from these kinds of places, because you have to know the "First World" but also deal with your own world.

For instance, Artur Zmijewski, a Polish artist, followed three working-class women around for twenty-four hours to show a portrait of life, of labor in Warsaw at this moment. Cao Fei, a Chinese artist, did a project with workers in a German-owned lightbulb factory in southern China, about their dreams and aspirations. They go from this assembly-line documentary to full-blown fantasy sequences with music and costumes.

What was important to us was that all these artists are anchored in specific locations and specific locales.

There's also a lot of sculpture in the show that has specific concrete relations to place, is made of substances specific to place. So the show is a map of current art practices but not a totalizing map; it shows important threads of what artists in the world are doing.